Cards needed in the remaining 40 yellow and orange pentads to turn them green

1048

Total percentage submitted in 2019

123.05%

Western Cape challenge 2019

Get 700 pentads and 2500 cards in the Western Cape in 2019

Pentad with 1 or more cards

208

29.71%

Pentad with 2 or more cards

69

9.86%

Pentad with 3 or more cards

38

5.43%

Pentad
with 4 or more cards

24

1.85%

Total cards submitted in 2019

416

Percentage of target

16.64%

Strategic Environmental Assessment

A "Strategic Environmental Assessment" (SEA) is being
led by Professor Bob Scholes of the University of the Witwatersrand.
The purpose of the SEA is to make informed decision about fracking,
if the reserves of shale gas in the central Karoo prove viable. So
the challenge to us, as citizen scientists, is to accumulate as much
data as we can for all our ADU atlas projects, both for the birds and
for all the groups of species in the Virtual Museum (see
http://vmus.adu.org.za/). Data collected up to about the middle of
next year will help influence decisions made about where fracking can
take place, and about how it is done. The South African government
has already taken the decision to go ahead. Other countries have
simply gone ahead without doing a proper biodiversity baseline study.
At least we have been given an opportunity to influence the where and
the how.

For the bird atlas, the objective is going to be to
get as much of this area to "foundational" coverage of four
checklists per pentad. In other words, we don't only want to target
the pentads which are not yet visited, we also want to target those
with one, two or three pentads, and get them to a minimum of four
checklists on the coverage map, and turn them GREEN. It is the
SEA-GREEN challenge. But the more data we get for any pentad within
this region the better; for those pentads for which we already
havelots of checklists, we have a baseline against which to measure
future change in species composition. This needs lots of checklists!